Meet the newest cleric in my abbey, Hestara! A war cleric whose deity is not yet concrete in the world of Ulei’Var, from which she hails. She, along with a handful of other unlucky adventurers, is Barovia fodder~ That’s right! Zen’s doing another Curse of Strahd run, and this high-tempered hick priestess is part of that new campaign run! I’m stoked! :D

Hestara is just a backwater village kid from a town that got wiped off the map by a short but incredibly deadly war. Her parents were lost to a marauder attack before she had a chance to remember them, and in doing so has no family surname. Just a moniker that stands in for a surname. She was raised by her human aunt and uncle, who own a tavern in a neighboring village.

As a young’un, she helped out the other kids, be it giving them a hand up, or standing up to the bullies. Throwing rocks at people who threw rocks at village stray animals. When she was 12, she put the fear of some god into a drunken traveler, after he backhanded her into a wall for sternly repeating her auntie’s words for the man to leave. Her resultant cracking of a clay pot over his head and bellowing at him to “GET OUT!” did quite the number! Hestara was 15 years old when the Risen War occurred, during which the King of the Undead of her homeland (Greymoor, no affiliation to franchised locales), tried to force his dominion over their realm and the neighboring kingdoms. The resultant suffering across the land put a bitter taste in her mouth towards tyranny.

At 18, after the war had been ended for two years, a small owly cleric passed through her town and wholeheartedly insinuated that the girl was to do great things. That there was a “holy pull” in her soul. Hestara ventured out not long after to Vilimond to become an acolyte, and at 25 she became a ranked cleric.

And then proceeded to get mouthy with a band of mercs and “forced” to join them via their boss, who is a character belonging to another player just as excited to experience Barovia as I am to dive back in. xD

Character, Art © ZenAquaria
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